tribes vengeance

In the past, demos were a pretty good indicator of what games would be like. You can thank id Software for that, because most often the demo would be the entire first mission of their games. I'm not saying that other developers (or publishers, for that matter) don't do the same, but recently it's been tough to gauge how good the final product will be when they take a mission out of context from the middle of the single player game, ask you to play through, and attempt to enjoy it. Far Cry easily comes to mind in this regard, while Thief: Deadly Shadows did an excellent job of convincing you why you should be buying the game. Multiplayer demos by their very nature are a little easier to create: the inclusion of a few maps and game types should keep the fans happy until release. My first exposure to Tribes: Vengeance was the multiplayer beta, which was fairly satisfying as a reimagining of Tribes gameplay. Having a single player campaign thrown in goes back to the game's roots, although at the time Starsiege seemed like more of a poor man's Mechwarrior.

I played the hell out of the final multiplayer demo, whereas the single player mission acted like more of a distraction. In a sad parody of the opening cutscene of Unreal Tournament 2003, the mission lets you to play as the leader of the Phoenix Tribe dropped into an arena to fight for his life. Because the mission was clearly taken from a point midway through the game, the preceding cutscene only served to confuse things.

The action overall is certainly fast-paced, but the small to medium sized maps and trigger-happy combat would be more suitable in Unreal Tournament or others of its ilk - hell, I could easily deal with having jetpacks in a deluxe version of Onslaught. But what this approach does is take out the large-scale team efforts that were probably my fondest memories of Tribes 2. There was something epic about the fields of battle in Tribes 2, a feeling that is unfortunately lost amongst the hustle of Vengeance. There were times where I was able to launch a coordinated assault for the enemy's flag, but most often it was simply bunch of sequential solo runs for the opposing team's base with a vehicle, which is the type of activity you would see on a BF1942 server. Even the spinfusor, the flagship member of the Tribes arsenal, feels a lot different and is a real bitch to aim properly. Granted, it does as much damage as a grenade launcher (including splash/area damage), but the rate of fire makes it a liability to wield.

The Unreal engine looks good, and Vengeance conveys the same types of bright colors and similarly detailed models as you would find in Unreal Tournament 2003. Attractive as this game is, players of Tribes 2 may find something missing. Vengeance almost feels stripped of the soul that made its forerunners so engaging. Some of the new included multiplayer modes like Fuel and Ball just seem uninspired, and if you really want to run across the field with a ball while being shot at, you should be playing Bombing Run.

All that being said, I found "Winterlake" to be the closest map that gave me that old school Tribes feeling. Seeing the enemy's fearsome dropship on the snow-peaked horizon making an approach for our base, I would often run to one of the stationary cannons and cut loose on the ship and its heavy-armoured escorts. I think many of my favorite moments while playing Vengenace was defending the base, simply because attacking felt so haphazard.

Because multiplayer feels like a Tribes skin on an existing game, I think the average player's reaction to Vengeance will boil down to the single player campaign. This is most unfortunate for a game that pretty much pioneered multiplayer combat on a massive scale. I guess it's only natural that something like this would happen - as we have seen in the past, multiplayer focused games will almost always short change on the single player. In the case of Tribes Vengeance, they just got it backwards.

three completes the five